Just a quick note to say that I’m going to be away until May. During that time I will be taking a holiday from twitter and, with a few exceptions, not tweeting at all. There is a small number of pre-arranged tweets that have been scheduled using Hootsuite and Tweetdeck, so they will go out automatically. They do not mean, of course, that I am monitoring my feed or that I have plugged into twitter.

I do not attend at all to Direct Messages. Apologies to those friendly types who leave DMs for me, but I’m afraid they won’t be read. It is simply impossible for me even to look at them, let alone respond to them, and have anything close to a life. I am sure you understand.

]]>I expect some think my being in Paris at the moment rather vain or sanctimonious or publicity-seeking — something bad anyway. It’s really just a coincidence that I happen to have this one free weekend, the only one for months. Paris seemed like the place to be and for once I really really don’t care what people think. Usually, as my friends never tire of telling me, I care far too much. But this is one instance where my sense of what I think is right trumps my sense of what is embarrassing. How unEnglish of me.

I heard a very interesting remark yesterday made by Manuel Valls, the French Prime Minister: “The [Charlie Hebdo] attacks show clear flaws in intelligence.” He spoke a thundering and resounding truth but not, I think, the one he meant.

We strive to find words strong enough to convey our outrage at the obscene atrocity committed in Paris last Wednesday morning. But it is easy to overlook the most apt word: stupid. Incredibly, imponderably, staggeringly, bowel-shatteringly dumb. ‘Clear flaws in intelligence’ indeed.

I cannot be sure exactly how many people since the murders have seen one or more of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons that ‘insult’ Islam or mock its prophet but I should imagine the number is now in the tens of millions. Had the brothers stayed their bloody hands it would have been 60,000 at the very most. Mohammed must be very cross indeed that his two cretinous representatives have spread the ‘insults’ so unimaginably far and wide. If Said and Cherif Kouachi had had a grain of sense in their terminally moronic heads they could have foreseen that their actions would create secular martyrs, propagate those images they so disliked and increase yet again reasonable people’s dislike of the faith they claimed (rightly or wrongly) to represent.

I have been told on twitter that the staff of Charlie Hebdo spewed ‘hate’. It is exceptionally important to remember that what they actually spewed, if you want to use that word, was contempt. Contempt for Islam, for Christianity, for Judaism – for anything they could have a go at. They were often, in the weasel word of our age, ‘inappropriate’. Their cartoons bordered on racist and repulsive. Had I been a Parisian I don’t doubt I would be a regular reader of Le Canard Enchainé (which approximates our venerable and superb Private Eye) and that I would look down my Parisian nose at readers of so vulgar and sophomoric an effusion as Charlie H.

But what has that to do with anything? I remember all those years ago when the fatwa was declared on Salman Rushdie, plenty of British writers and commentators who absolutely should have known better claimed that The Satanic Verses ‘really wasn’t that good’, the implication being that it was therefore hardly worth making a stand against the death sentence laid on its author. As it happens (not that it matters of course) … The Satanic Verses is one of the great post-war comic novels. Similar horrible nonsense was spouted recently by some on the subject of the Sony film The Interview. ‘Oh, it’s actually rather poor.’

The now largely forgotten writer, broadcaster and Christian apologist Malcolm Muggeridge destroyed his legacy as a serious and interesting man in fifteen footling minutes on television in which he languidly described Monty Python’s Life of Brian as ‘tenth rate’ … as if that were a reason to stop it being screened. Utterly disingenuous. He wanted to stop it being screened because he was ‘offended’ by its ‘blasphemy’ and so he offered the same non-argument as those advanced by his fellow Festival of Light founder Mary Whitehouse of hilarious memory: “Oh I’m not shocked, oh no. In fact I found it rather boring.” Of course you did darling, and therefore we must certainly censor it right away. Bah! These days Life of Brian regularly comes top in all time best comedy film polls and Muggeridge might only be warmly remembered for being the MI5 officer who debriefed in kindly manner P. G. Wodehouse and his wife in Paris after its liberation in 1944.

So let no one think that in order to be defended against censorship of any kind, let alone the terminal horrors of Wednesday 7th January, a work of art or a film or a novel or a cartoon need be ‘first rate’ (whatever that means).

And aren’t we all tired of those who claim to know the answer to life, death and the creation being so fucking sensitive about their knowledge? If I knew the answer to it all, if I thought I understood the wishes of the author of the universe and was privileged to understand what happens to us after death, the last thing I would be is all prickly and defensive. ‘Mock me all you like,’ I’d cry. ‘Go on, laugh your socks off, paint crude daubs, make mocking films. They pass me by as the idle wind which I respect not.’

Whether it is deluded pricks chanting Christian slogans like Anders Behring Breivik in Oslo or deluded pricks chanting Islamic ones like Said and Charif Kouachi in Paris the result is the same: in this breast at least arises even more, as if that were possible, contempt for the dumb, semi-literate, ill-founded, unreasoned drivel that forms the basis of their juvenile, crazed and self-defeating actions.

There will be a march here in Paris tomorrow and I shall do my best to slip into the human stream and chant in my schoolboy French accent:

]]>http://www.stephenfry.com/2015/01/10/you-must-mock/feed/0Estonia Everybody! Freedom Reignedhttp://www.stephenfry.com/2014/10/09/estonia-decided/
http://www.stephenfry.com/2014/10/09/estonia-decided/#commentsThu, 09 Oct 2014 09:31:48 +0000http://www.stephenfry.com/?p=8381The wonderful, wonderful news for the time being is that Estonia’s second reading of its bill allowing equal rights was passed this morning in Tallin's parliament.

]]>Estonia Decided! You may think that my recent blog about the upcoming vote in Tallinn was ‘outside intervention’ and ‘none of my business.’ I would prefer to believe that it really was no more than a free piece of writing sent into the world telling the story of how a modern country could bring new hope – accepting, of course, all the faults that all countries have. I may have painted Estonia as some kind of Utopia. No democracy, no matter how hard it tries, can be that. After all, Utopia means ‘No-Place’.

Could Estonia prove itself to be progressive, wise, just and fair enough to help build a diverse society in which its straight and LGBT members could be treated with equal respect? I had no more resources than a keyboard and a blog outlet (and a fair number of twitter followers of course); but this was nothing compared with the extreme evangelical American right whose unholy alliance with Putinista/Othodox nationalism interfered on the ground in independent Estonia by means of direct interjections of money, flown in outsiders and the blackest of black black propaganda.

I should add that the not inconsiderable Russian minority in Estonia deserves respect and rights too, as of course to do all that country’s ethnic minorities. But, alongside the US Supreme Court’s recent rulings, it is has been good couple of days for LGBT Human Rights.

The Enlightenment of the 18th century brought us free-thought, the right to dissent, permission to enquire into the material universe without torture or excommunication, the ability to speak our minds and live our own lives and at last universal suffrage and the question of gender and sexuality parity: that its principles and ideals should be under threat not just from the lies and maniacal bigotries of the fundamentalists of the American right and their ‘family’ congresses but also from the Kremlin’s pact with nationalism and the Russian Church is bad enough. Meanwhile however, Turkey (and especially its Kurdish region) has lapping at its borders a boiling acid ocean of hatred not seen or imagined in our lifetime. The aims of ISIS/IS/ISL, of course, are more brutally extreme and relentlessly hate-filled than those of the World Family Congress or its European adherents and the Russo-Orthodox partnership. They have in common though a contempt for everything to do with the complexities, nuances and difficulties that so (contempibly to them) torture the liberal conscience.

It is just so plain easy to be a convinced extremist. Or even to be commitedly partisan in one political or social direction or another. Every day you know what to think about what: your scriptures, your church, your party have told you. It’s just so damned hard to to be liberal. A word that derives from the Latin for ‘free’ of course. We are not guided by revealed texts, not even by party manifestos. We don’t want to be hated, but we don’t want to hate either. We are first on the blacklists of every fundamentalist. Me more than most I suppose. Gay and a Jew and a busybody loudmouth liberal? What chance have I got when the Ottoman Empire Redux sweeps not just as far as Vienna as it did 300 or so years ago, but maybe this time even further?

The wonderful, wonderful news for the time being is that Estonia’s second reading of its bill allowing equal rights was passed this morning in Tallinn’s parliament. It shines like a good deed in a naughty world.

But what about the real fate of humanistic, fair-minded, balanced people? Those of us who take the word liberal to be a badge of pride, like honourable, or kind, or decent, and whose slogans are tolerance, diversity, understanding, fairness, mercy and justice? How are we going to survive the east wind that is coming? What weapons to do we have other than words? If the whole Western World with its satellites, 24/7 computer geniuses and intelligence experts never even saw ISIS coming, whom can we trust to do anything than make yet more catastrophic mistakes, hypocritical alliances and military blunders?

Still, on the whole a good day.

xS

The official press statement here:

Estonia becomes the first ex-Soviet country to legalize same-sex partnerships

October 9, Tallinn – Estonia made history today when the country’s parliament passed the gender-neutral Civil Partnership Act on a close vote of 40 to 38. The new law acknowledges civil unions for all couples, regardless of the gender of the partners, and grants same-sex couples rights and responsibilities similar to a marriage between a heterosexual couple.

“The Civil Partnership Act is another step closer to a more tolerant and socially inclusive society. I am extremely thankful to my colleagues who supported the bill as real statesmen in spite of strong opposition, and who stood for democracy and human rights even under great pressure,” Imre Sooäär, the MP and the initiator of the Act said.

Peeter Rebane, a London-based film director and advocate for the Act is satisfied with the result: “It was a long fight for us to achieve something so basic and obvious. This act will guarantee the same-sex couples their fundamental rights that so-called traditional couples take for granted – a right to establish a family with the loved one, raise children, and enjoy financial benefits equal to married couples.”
“By passing this law, Estonia gave an example to all countries in this region who hopefully will follow us. I am extremely glad that we are drifting away from Soviet-minded homophobia and moving towards a free and tolerant society where all people are valued the same way and everyone has equal rights,” said Kari Käsper, Head of the Estonian Human Rights Centre, a human rights watchdog NGO.

The Civil Partnership Act will come into effect on January 1, 2016.

The Estonian Human Rights Centre is an independent human rights advocacy NGO dedicated to the advancement and protection of human rights in Estonia.

The Estonian LGBT Association is the official representative of LGBT citizens in Estonia. It focuses on informing the general public about LGBT people, sexual education, and advancing LGBT rights.

SEKY is a NGO that focuses on protecting the LGBT community’s rights in Estonia and representing their rights in court.

]]>http://www.stephenfry.com/2014/10/09/estonia-decided/feed/0Everybodyhttp://www.stephenfry.com/2014/10/06/everybodyestonia/
http://www.stephenfry.com/2014/10/06/everybodyestonia/#commentsMon, 06 Oct 2014 10:02:08 +0000http://www.stephenfry.com/?p=8365The World Congress of Families, a US based evangelist group that has already done so much to ruin Uganda, has teamed up with the Kremlin to parachute into Estonia huge quantities of money with which to browbeat, bully and blackmail parliamentarians

]]>Consider Estonia. Few do, or seem to. In many ways her status is one of the miracles of the modern world. With a population of just 1.3 million this is a country that has topped both the State of World Liberty Index and the Freedom House Internet Freedom list and is routinely referred to as the most ‘wired’ country in Europe. Probably only South Korea has better and faster broadband infrastructure. An Estonian friend of mine told me that as much as five years ago he enjoyed and indeed expected broadband speeds of 100 megabytes per second. Skype was invented here. Post-production media houses flourish and new sound stages are being built in harness with tax credit arrangements to encourage film production. Being the fourth best nation to speak English as a second language helps. This is a forward looking, highly prosperous, diverse, culturally, religiously and racially tolerant country that identifies itself as Nordic rather than Baltic.

Ten years a member of Nato and the EU, Estonia then joined the OECD and Eurozone and is now officially designated the fourth freest economy in Europe. After the brutality of post Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact Soviet occupation, followed by the unimaginable horrors of the Nazis, the inevitable re-annexation by Soviet Russia and the bloody and ruthless Stalinist purges that ensued, at least a quarter of the population was wiped out in less than two decades. That the country should rise so quickly and painlessly as a free, progressive nation after the thawing of the Soviet ice is little short of miraculous.

The Prime Minister of the ruling Estonian Reform Party Taavi Rõivas is, at 35, Europe’s youngest leader. Individual freedom of speech and religion are an essential element of Estonia’s constitution. Now that the Reform Party is in power there are enough progressive parliamentarians to enact a law allowing gay partnerships.

Suddenly. Guess what? The World Congress of Families, a US based evangelist group that has already done so much to ruin Uganda, has teamed up with the Kremlin to parachute into Estonia huge quantities of money with which to browbeat, bully and blackmail parliamentarians, with which to spew out tens of thousands of automated provocative hate-speech emails, with which to produce booklets for every Estonian home repeating the usual vile libels about homosexuality being akin to paedophilia, a decadent ‘Western’ life choice and a threat to the citizenry and future of the world.

Meanwhile, Estonia’s gay rights advocates have been gentle and reasonable in the face of this grotesque alliance. “Estonia does not need the Civil Partnership Act for sticking up our noses and saying: look at us, we are not Soviets any more. Estonia needs this Act so that everyone living here could make sensible arrangements for cohabitation, instead of living with the knowledge that their minority status makes them marginalised or somewhat inferior to the others,” writes the Speaker of the Estonian Parliament, Eiki Nestor.

But the World Congress of Families — which was due to meet in Russia and only altered its plans for ‘logistical’ (not moral) reasons when Russia invaded Crimea — believes that a Russia newly charged with Orthodox zeal is just the partner they are looking for. And vice versa. According to Konstantin Malofeev of the Foundation of St Basil the Great, an ally of the WCF, “Christian Russia can help liberate the West from the new liberal anti-Christian totalitarianism of political correctness, gender ideology, mass-media censorship and neo-Marxist dogma.” In turn Lawrence Jacobs, the vice-president of the WCF believes “The Russians might be Christian saviours to the world; at the U.N. they really are the ones standing up for these traditional values of family and faith.”

François Legrier, president of the right-wing Catholic Movement For Families attacks the “individualistic and freedom-loving philosophy of Enlightenment that was allegedly trying to free a man from any law that was alien to him.”

And there we have it. The Enlightenment itself, born in France as much as anywhere, the Enlightenment out of which grew America, universal suffrage, scientific enquiry, free thinking and freedom from the shackles of aristocracy and ecclesiasticism – the Enlightenment itself is identified not as the proudest achievement of the West but as a sick and evil inheritance to be thrown off. How heartily the Islamic State would agree. In this battle the WCF, The Foundation of St Basil, the Catholic Movement of Families and all the ‘Family Values’ groups have chosen gay rights as their battle-ground and it is gay bones that get broken, gay blood that gets spilled by this toxic mix of nationalism and fundamentalism.

Tomorrow, Tuesday, Estonia’s parliament votes on this issue. My guess is that the more the Russian and Western evangelical alliances threaten and lie, the more they bribe and bully then the more the proud parliamentarians representing a proud and independent people will resent it.

Estonia (one of the most secular and non-religious countries on earth) has proved it can be a beacon to the world: it has seen that free markets, free speech and investment in the future can bring remarkable dividends even to a small nation with a history of being squeezed, occupied and terrorised. Gay rights are part of the diversity and individual freedom that, along with racial, gender, journalistic and religious freedoms, guarantee prosperous global trade and exchange, not just economically, but culturally.

“Civilisation is on the verge of destruction, and only Russia can become a centre of consolidation of all the healthy forces and resistance to the sodomisation of the world, that is why the whole Europe is looking at it with hope,” says the alliance.

In 2001 Estonia won the Eurovision Song Contest: the title of its winning entry was ‘Everybody’. And that is why the whole of Europe is looking at Estonia with hope.

For information and advice as to how you might be able to help, please contact Peeter Rebane: peeter AT thefactory DOT us

]]>http://www.stephenfry.com/2014/10/06/everybodyestonia/feed/0Where Does it Come From?http://www.stephenfry.com/2014/09/29/wheredoesitcomefrom/
http://www.stephenfry.com/2014/09/29/wheredoesitcomefrom/#commentsMon, 29 Sep 2014 14:01:08 +0000http://www.stephenfry.com/?p=8325Audiences often don’t believe me when I tell them that as I stand in the wings of the theatre or civic hall where a book publicity “event” takes place I have in my head absolutely no idea what I am going tho say. It is a very bewildering and alarming feeling.

]]>Well it’s been a week of launches. I had a book launched on Thursday: a few days earlier, my team and I launched The Old Friary, this third reboot of stephenfry.com or stephenfry.uk as we now like to call ourselves.

Audiences often don’t believe me when I tell them that as I stand in the wings of the theatre or civic hall where a book publicity “event” takes place I have in my head absolutely no idea what I am going to say. It is a very bewildering and alarming feeling. A kind of secular equivalent of an Elmer Gantry awaiting for the spirit to descend. So far, in Manchester, Bristol and Sheffield the words seems to have come unbidden to my lips mysteriously but adequately enough. Tonight I hope that I will manage to appear on stage at the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh and not open and close my mouth like a guppy fish, hurl a projectile arc of vomit at the front row, lay a small turd on the boards and then run screaming through the wings never to be heard from again. But you can’t guarantee it, that’s the problem. No matter how many times I might have been said to have got away with a one and half hour talk to an audience in the past, I can never be sure that this time it will work. You see, I don’t really know what part of myself I access when I talk publicly at all. It can’t be the same part I access when I pop into a newsagent’s and ask for a packet of crisps, can it? Or the same part I access when I (on a so embarrassingly and unfilially infrequent a basis) call my parents for a chat?

No, I suppose it must all be controlled by some machine or organ in another room in my eccentric human house. A not dissimilar one to those used by stand-up comics, evangelists, politicians and salesmen. I have never trained and — as I continue to assure you — I have never taken an ability to speak to thousands of strangers for granted. All I can say is, if an occasion arises which necessitates you having to speak, whether for business, or a wedding or funeral, whatever you do do not consult a life or speaking coach. The worst and most embarrassing talks I have ever heard have come from pupils of those purporting to be able to pass on the “secrets” of public speaking.

This week I shall make my penultimate address (saving Norfolk for last naturally) in London’s Royal Festival Hall, which is no bigger or more important than the Colston Hall in Bristol, or Manchester’s Free Trade Hall but offers one difference: it is an event that will be live-streamed to 300 UK cinemas and 50 more in Australia, a dozen or so in New Zealand and another lord knows how many around the rest of the world (excluding the United States, which is a separate territory for publishing, don’t ask me why). This will be the evening where puking and pooping on entrance really would be a disaster.

I’ll let you know know how it all goes if you don’t have a ticket for your local cinema, this site has all the details, he oozed sluttishly). But in the meantime I must get on with writing an address I have to give soon in Denver, Colorado for the Matthew Shepard Foundation - this is the kind of honour and privilege that demands that the part of me that is capable of speaking does not seal up or fail. Not being sure is part of life’s adventure I suppose and I am always prepared for the day when the throat croaks, the palms sweat, the air hisses from the lungs and nothing comes out. But please please let it not be on October 11th at the Seawell Grand Ballroom, Denver, Colorado…

]]>http://www.stephenfry.com/2014/09/29/wheredoesitcomefrom/feed/0Writing a selfiehttp://www.stephenfry.com/2014/09/24/writing-selfie/
http://www.stephenfry.com/2014/09/24/writing-selfie/#commentsWed, 24 Sep 2014 07:37:02 +0000http://www.stephenfry.uk/?p=8309Take this business of autobiography. A man or woman gets to a certain age, a certain prominence, if one dare use the word, and a publisher asks them to put down the story of their life in book form.

]]>Take this business of autobiography. A man or woman gets to a certain age, a certain prominence, if one dare use the word, and a publisher asks them to put down the story of their life in book form. The newly commissioned author comes up with a memoir that takes them only as far as their late teens, because their childhood was one chock full of scandal and sauciness: school expulsions, emotional explosions, erotic disasters, amatory obsession, the distressing nature of dawning sexuality, credit card fraud, trial, imprisonment and suchlike. They give the book some obvious and straightforward title like – oh, I don’t know – Over Edom Shall I Cast Out My Shoe and life rolls on.

The publishers, being pleased that this childhood memoir sold pretty well, ask the author if they might have another autobiography up his or her sleeve. Off the author goes for a quantity of months to try to hack into shape the story of how the unfortunate young person we left at the end of the first memoir transformed themselves into someone lucky enough to go to a good university, meet stunningly talented and influential people and find work and a measure of success in the wonderful business called show. It is a story of close friendships and lucky accidents and the author might call it, for example, The Seymour Chronicles — if their name happened to be Seymour that is.

Then we come to part three. The very idea of a person who isn’t a Field Marshall or ex-President writing a third volume of autobiography might seem more than a little hubristic, but this person does have more to tell, they really do.

But here is the problem — and I might as well come clean now and let you into the secret that the hypothetical unknown author we have been talking about is me. I. Fry — the problem is that the third story in this saga concerns a rather messy subject. A subject like so many in the world, especially the world of publicly known people, that is both over-exposed and over-discussed and under-exposed and under-discussed. The subject is drugs and dependency.

I hope I am not a paranoid person, but I do know there will be many absolutely revolted by an autobiography that reveals the sordid details of a young man who should know better partying himself almost to a stupor and playing chicken with fate in so futile, predictable and clichaic a way. No matter how many times I say in the book that I am not proud of myself, no matter how many times I berate myself, despite the title of the book being More Fool Me, there will be those who choose to believe that I am a) pathetically hand-wringing and begging for sympathy or b) even more pathetically boasting about wild Soho BoHo days, stories of which are ten a penny and so vieux jeu.

The only point of writing an autobiography, or so at least it seems to me, is to be honest. And in this book I have been utterly candid about a period of my life in which I spent an enormous amount of time and money on cocaine powder. I know how stupid that is, but I also know better people than me have found themselves on the same path. The late, glorious and hugely missed Robin Williams was particularly brilliant on the subject of what he called the Devil’s Dandruff or the Peruvian Marching Powder, which he also was slave to for a number of years. “A drug that makes you paranoid and impotent? Oh goodie, I’ll have more of that, please!”

How to tread the path then between sensationalism, self-pity, braggadocio and mimsy evasion? I hope I have managed truthfully to tell the story of those days, but to have done so in an entirely earnest and po faced manner is contrary to my every instinct and also, I think, unfaithful to the truth of life. Making light of something heavy makes it easier to bear. It is not always the right thing to do, but unending gravity is as tedious as unending levity. Facetiousness in the face of suicidal impulses and insane bravado would not be wise or apt I think, but I know there will be those who will only ever believe such a subject can be written about in the literary equivalent of hushed medical or clerical whispers. Confessional tones, with bowed head and supplicant hands — no self-pity, but not too much self-laceration either and certainly no self-justification. I have tried to avoid all those self- faults, but heaven knows a spiteful sprite determined to make me look bad could fillet some passages and misrepresent the book as a crowing recommendation of coke or an unacceptably weaselly and greasy plea for understanding.

It is not supposed to be any of those things. It is meant to tell the story of a foolish period in the life of an often very foolish man.

I have a feeling that the honesty of some parts of the book will attract the unwelcome attention of certain columnists and commentators. I do not read newspapers as I think is pretty well known, but I expect that Peter Hitchens or Judy Burchill or some other slug will be tweezered out of the little crack of rock they inhabit and told to slime over me, which is a thing they apparently like to do. Well, whatever keeps the little darlings happy. To be hated by the hateful is one of the great achievements in life. What the eye doesn’t see the stomach doesn’t heave over.

I will at one and the same time be hunkering down, drawing up the blankets and turning off the lights and going round Britain and Scotland doing what publishers call “events”: one and a half hour talks and readings followed by signings. Which all sounds rather hypocritical I suppose. Though I think ‘ambiguous’ or ‘equivocal’ or ‘interestingly complex’ sound much better and more apt, don’t you?

I shall almost certainly be off the guest lists of the mighty as a result of some of the confessional in the book and I should imagine I have entirely dished my chances of being granted the Order of the Thistle or a life peerage, but I can probably soldier on with the knowledge that the truth will set me free.

Or will it imprison me? Every time I am out in public and need to go for a pee, will people be saying as they see me disappear into the Gents, “Uh-oh! Stephen’s back on the coke again…’?

]]>http://www.stephenfry.com/2014/09/24/writing-selfie/feed/0The Old Friaryhttp://www.stephenfry.com/2014/09/22/old-friary/
http://www.stephenfry.com/2014/09/22/old-friary/#commentsMon, 22 Sep 2014 08:00:29 +0000http://www.stephenfry.com/?p=8219As hard as it might be to believe, all the high-tech, vibrantly coloured glowing decor you are enjoying is housed and integrated on the site an old and recently excavated Dominican Friary.

]]>This modish testament to 21st century style and medieval grandeur combines traditional comfort with modern convenience. As hard as it might be to believe, all the high-tech, vibrantly coloured glowing decor you are enjoying is housed and integrated on the site of an old and recently excavated Dominican Friary. The floor spaces, lighting, and ambience have been sympathetically composed to provide safe, exciting places to explore everything that is Fry: you will find archives, a blogorium, screening rooms, a souvenir shop and more.

The Old Friary is opening up new rooms and areas as we lovingly continue this project, so consider this a work in progress. In a few months, at the grand opening, you will find this to be I hope, your home from home – somewhere to shelter from the storms and stresses of modern life: cunningly contrived to be both connected yet disconnected.

Sometimes high demand will necessitate queuing, your cooperation and patience is appreciated.

]]>http://www.stephenfry.com/2014/09/22/old-friary/feed/0Apple Hit Successive Sixeshttp://www.stephenfry.com/2014/09/17/apple-hit-successive-sixes/
http://www.stephenfry.com/2014/09/17/apple-hit-successive-sixes/#commentsWed, 17 Sep 2014 06:00:07 +0000http://www.stephenfry.uk/?p=7987Since January 1984 when I bought my first Apple Macintosh, through the dark late 80s and mid 90s when the company had all but 3% of the personal computer market, I have developed the thickest of skins when it comes to Apple-haters.

]]>Since January 1984 when I bought my first Apple Macintosh, through the dark late 80s and mid 90s when the company had all but 3% of the personal computer market, I have developed the thickest of skins when it comes to Apple-haters.

I could fill this entire article with links to ancient, now embarrassing, sneers: “what’s the point of an iPod?”; “the iPhone is too large”; “huh, the iPad is nothing but a big iPhone?” (right, and a swimming pool is nothing but a big bath). “How disgraceful are the working conditions in which Apple devices are manufactured!” — oddly leaving out Samsung, Sony, Dell, LG, HTC and all the other companies who have their devices made in the same factories and have, unlike Apple, been much less transparent about it and failed to abandon so many of the controversial materials – beryllium most recently – that Apple have now removed from their supply chain. I welcome, love, reverence and adore Android, Windows and any other mobile operating system. The richer the eco-system, the better for all. I’ve never thought anyone pretentious for owning a BlackBerry or an LG Curve, but when it comes to Apple, it’s open season. “Baaah you’re all sheep, or “Huh, far more Samsungs are sold anyway!” Can’t have it both ways, darlings…

Apple has often innovated, but being first to market is not the point or focus of the corporation: the iPod wasn’t the first mp3 player, iPhones came late to multi-tasking — “we wanted to wait until we had the best smartphone multi-tasking system in the world,” Steve Jobs said on unveiling iOS 4 in 2010, and no one can doubt his team achieved that goal.

Regarding the dimensions, many Android owners will point out how late the Cupertino giant has come to the size game. But once again, Apple wanted to wait until they got the perfect merger of optical, CPU, battery life, resolution, materials and OS workarounds. Being first isn’t the point, being the best is.

The 6 is 4.7in measured diagonally, the 6 Plus is 5.5in, yet both are lighter than the 5s: more high res, more powerful, and offer equal or better battery life in all metrics. Personal fitness is becoming a big issue: the addition of a barometer into the phones allows the new bundled Health app to distinguish height, climbs and stairs as well as all the other sporty parameters.

These phones, in silver, gold or “space grey”, are utterly gorgeous objects in the hand and to the eye. They are released with the superb iOS 8 – an operating system leap forward for the iPhone and iPad, blessedly backwardly compatible all the way down to the 4S.

How right Apple have been proved in delaying needless incorporation of a Near Field Communication radio into their devices until this year: NFC has been in BlackBerries and other phones for two years but I haven’t met anyone who uses the feature yet in any sensible way. Now, deals have been struck, the Apple Pay technology is ready to work and to revolutionise retail (US only thus far – which needs it, they don’t even have chip and PIN!), but Europe and the world soon.

The matchless design and innovation team led by Sir Jony Ive — who has head-hunted to Apple the brilliant Australian designer Marc Newson (over whom at the launch I spilled some horrible green wheatgrass and spirulina drink that would otherwise have gone all over P Diddy) — have produced two devices of absolutely exquisite dimensions, heft and feel. I have played with both for a week and cannot decide which I would keep.

Under the bonnet they each offer a ravishing Retina HD display. The Plus has more pixels and the (real) advantage of optical rather than digital camera shake correction as well as full HD video allowing a devastatingly cool 720p slowmo that will make Matrix directors of us all. At 5 inches corner to corner the 6 Plus is, to my large hands, absolutely ideal, but then for most users I would recommend the 6. I now type faster on each, which I wouldn’t have thought possible. The open API keyboard word prediction table can only improve as companies like Britain’s Swiftkey, so hugely successful already on Android, add an iOS app complete with their already compendious idiolect dictionaries, which will allow you to text or type as if you are Dickens or Doctors Johnson or Dre. There’s barely space for me to talk about the amazing new VoLTE option, allowing you to hold a conversation using wireless at home or office and continue seamlessly as you move out of WiFi range allowing the mobile network (EE in the UK’s case) to take over without a blip.It only needs for me to leave with the confident prediction that these phones will prove through sales, as I believe them to be, the best and most beautiful mobile telecom technology ever yet produced. So sue me if if I’m proved wrong. Oh and, of course, Watch this space…

]]>http://www.stephenfry.com/2014/09/17/apple-hit-successive-sixes/feed/0Guest Blogger, Martha Lane Fox, Baroness Lane Fox of Sohohttp://www.stephenfry.com/2014/06/10/guest-blogger-martha-lane-fox-baroness-lane-fox-of-soho/
http://www.stephenfry.com/2014/06/10/guest-blogger-martha-lane-fox-baroness-lane-fox-of-soho/#commentsTue, 10 Jun 2014 09:00:15 +0000http://www.stephenfry.com/?p=7677It was only 25 years ago that Tim Berners Lee invented the world wide web. An incredible invention by a british man whose discovery changed the way information, entertainment and business were organised forever.

]]>It was only 25 years ago that Tim Berners Lee invented the world wide web. An incredible invention by a british man whose discovery changed the way information, entertainment and business were organised forever. And it seems just as strange to me that as recently as 1998 when Brent Hoberman and I started lastminute.com we spent all our time convincing people the internet wasn’t going to blow up. We would call thousands of hotels and airlines to ask them to give us rooms and seats to sell. How quickly the world has changed.

The UK continues to lead the world in many aspects of the digital revolution. the British are the most advanced online shoppers on the planet (In 2014 e-commerce will account for about 20% of total UK retail) the UK internet sector is bigger than the health or education or construction sectors. Britain has created world-leading businesses – Ssos, Moshi Monsters and, dare I say it, lastminute.com London is becoming a significant tech hub but it is not alone – Edinburgh, Bristol, Brighton are all seeing record numbers of digital start ups.

From September every primary school child will be taught coding, a visionary policy that is the most advanced in the G8.

But despite all of this I fear we are creating a two tier digital country. There are 11 million adults who lack four basic online skills – the ability to communicate, search and share information and to do these things safely. 50% are over 65 but 50% are of working age in a country where 90% of new jobs require basic online skills and many vacancies are only advertised online.

in addition only 30% of small businesses are able to transact online meaning they miss out on both savings and sales. go on uk, the cross sector charity i chair estimates there is £68bn of value to the economy if we address these adult skills. we will need to fill 1m technology sector jobs by 2020 which is looking nearly impossible from our current workforce. the number of women in the uk tech sector is actually falling as an overall percentage and yet the sector is growing in importance – if current trends are not reversed ladygeek estimates only 1% of the sector could be female by 2040.

I am an optimist but we need to keep championing the importance of inclusion and the universality of skills, infrastructure and access otherwise we will never reach our digital potential.

]]>http://www.stephenfry.com/2014/06/10/guest-blogger-martha-lane-fox-baroness-lane-fox-of-soho/feed/0Guest blogger, James Rhodes, Pianisthttp://www.stephenfry.com/2014/06/10/guest-blogger-james-rhodes-pianist/
http://www.stephenfry.com/2014/06/10/guest-blogger-james-rhodes-pianist/#commentsTue, 10 Jun 2014 09:00:15 +0000http://www.stephenfry.com/?p=7673We have a chance, now more than ever before, to benefit from such thrilling technological innovation and channel our use of it in a way that is less about consumerism, greed and ego and more about creating change.

]]>Going beneath the shiny allure of another new iThing, I have mixed feelings about technology. There is the brain-melting awe of knowing that third-world eye examinations can be done remotely, cheaply and quickly using a simple phone camera and saving countless thousands from blindness. The pride at vital social changes that take place as a direct result of Twitter campaigns.

The relief at missing children found through Facebook shares (in my case actually finding a perpetrator of child abuse via Facebook which led to him being arrested and charged). The economic and creative boost brought about by Kickstarter. The immense good that comes from JustGiving and present-day saints like Stephen Sutton. Used correctly, tech in 2014 offers company, comfort, truth, independence, companionship and convenience in an increasingly complex, time-pressured and sometimes lonely world.

There is, however, the inevitable flip side – the bullying, misogyny, child abuse, intimidation and hatred that is so effortlessly and easily spread at the click of a button.

As ever, it is the people and not the technology that is responsible for using that technology in the service of good or ill, and whilst that has echoes of the slightly ridiculous ‘guns don’t kill people, people kill people’ tenet of NRA nuts throughout America, it remains a valid point.

Never before has technology become so tied in with our society and the development of that society. Its capacity for good is infinite – economically, spiritually, socially, creatively and medicinally. Things are moving forward exponentially, and although there is an inevitable struggle to keep up to date as progress snowballs, with that same progress comes the opportunity to do almost unimaginable good.

We have a chance, now more than ever before, to benefit from such thrilling technological innovation and channel our use of it in a way that is less about consumerism, greed and ego and more about creating change, competing economically on a global stage and coming together. Let’s not waste it.